Harry Potter and the Satanic Specters: The Franchise as Seen Through its Religious Metaliterature

[Here is a thing I just wrote for In Media Res. It is impolitely long, but I had a blast writing it. Click HD on the slideshow, and you can read the covers first hand.]

Conversations on Harry Potter seem to inevitably return to quantity - 67 languages, 400 million copies, £15 billion - but when the religious reactions are invoked, they remain unmeasured - a few churches complaining, but many others which aren’t. Toward giving Rowling’s religious readership some specificity, we might begin with the 65 works easily identified in Worldcat, or with the 14 works in the slideshow at right (including two audio series).

When I began investigating these books, I thought I would discover the same concerns about the seductions of Satanism which surrounded Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980s, but I was surprised at the range of religious readings I found. Of course, if one would like to remain convinced that it would take an incredibly shallow reading to articulate Potter to occult practice, I recommend you read Phil Arms’ book, but even here a great deal has changed since the 1980s. In particular, every concerned work had to wrestle with the question of whether or not the witchcraft denounced in Deuteronomy 18:10-11 includes contemporary Wicca. And, that answer in hand, they each had to decide whether the Pagan Federation was right when they claimed to be "swamped" with new applicants, and partially attributed that fact to supernatural themes in popular literature. Not every author was concerned, but those who were had to discuss the possibility that Christianity is now vying for adolescent faith not against graveyard conspiracies, but respectible and accessible witchcraft.

But the most interesting critique was that which began after the specter of occult practice passed. Authors like Connie Neal worry less about the books as such than about the fact that Christians were fighting with one another over them, and work to create a space where Christians with diverse readings of the text could treat one another with love. And in Abanes we find a nuanced attention to the ethics and metaphysics of the Potter books which challenges the conventional wisdom likening Rowling to Tolkien (he is an outspoken supporter of the latter). Restoring the metaphysical nuance obscured by film adaptation, Albanes encourages serious reflection on the fact that humans never weild magical power in the Lord of the Rings books. Gandalf was once, and could still be, a vivid and specific analog of a Christian angel in a way that Harry really cannot. Some of the complaints in this literature do not emerge from shallow readings or fast fears, but a depth of reflection that exceeds that of many academic commentators.

And religious readings of Potter also include many works that find profound homiletical teachings in the series, not for people in general, but for their tradition in very particular. The sixteen sermons that Rev. John Zingaro collected from a circle of Potter-friendly pastors present an as-yet-unnamed genre we might call "fan-homiletics." And Luke Bell’s explication of what he, as a monk, learned from the series makes innumerable tiny patterns in the book spiritually significant.

In recent years, scholars of popular culture have realized that our work must not be constrained by (though it must account for) licensing decisions. We have learned to attend to fan-art, but we have not yet begun to take seriously the creativity in religious readings of popular culture. Of all of the multiple, community-specific readings of Harry Potter, this minor analytical genre, both when it supports and when it opposes Rowling’s series, attends to the inner lives of its readers admirably. Here, unlike the theme parks, licensed clothing, and action figures, our attention is drawn toward what might be Harry Potter’s big take-away: Young people share an ethical and metaphysical reality to which "fun" is not an adequate orientation.

Ghosts 1: Pokemon Cursed Black

Yesterday I was stumbling about the other day, and I came across the story of a hacked version of the original Pokemon cartridge which added "Ghost" as a possible starting character. In this version, the story goes:

Defending Pokémon were unable to attack Ghost — it would only say they were too scared to move. When the move “Curse” was used in battle, the screen would cut to black. The cry of the defending Pokémon would be heard, but it was distorted, played at a much lower pitch than normal. The battle screen would then reappear, and the defending Pokémon would be gone. If used in a battle against a trainer, when the Pokéballs representing their Pokemon would appear in the corner, they would have one fewer Pokéball.

The implication was that the Pokémon died.

What’s even stranger is that after defeating a trainer and seeing “Red received $200 for winning!”, the battle commands would appear again. If you selected “Run”, the battle would end as it normally does. You could also select Curse. If you did, upon returning to the overworld, the trainer’s sprite would be gone. After leaving and reentering the area, the spot [where] the trainer had been would be replaced with a tombstone like the ones at Lavender Tower.

But the most interesting part is that victory is replaced by merciless penance for the evil done by the player. Of course, this forced moral reflection, driving the player to stare at the endless violence done in the course of an adventure, appears in other games, but it is incredibly rare and often cordoned into the tiny world of Serious Games. Please, read the post yourself to get a surprisingly chilling sense of the way that a Gameboy adventure could create a moment of moral reflection.
Of course, for Pokemon to force a serious engagement with the ethical possibility of player action requires that the mandatory sportsfolkship of the series be circumvented. Here, the insertion of the "curse" attack is an artistic insertion of foul play, bringing murder into a game where violence is always somehow limited to the polite possibilities of Olympic wrestling, and hunting always ends in either escape, capture, or curable injury. Now the question becomes thinkable, "Where was death in the Pokemon universe this whole time? How did all of those lightning and fire attacks end so cleanly?"
This is, in some sense, well tread territory. The obsession with the dead in video games, particularly those which make violence most cartoonish and dismissable, is a familiar theme in fan art. But it is surprising how completely the types of violence possible in video games escape mainstream criticism. When we see gunplay of a kind that makes sense out-here, parent groups frequently complain, but attention to the death of goombas or pokemon is left entirely to the marginal play of fan creativity.
It is appropriate, then, that Pokemon Black is itself a ghost. Know Your Meme thinks it is probably just a story, a fiction about a game, not as a game, but ghosts thrive on quasi-existence. It has been created as a "visual novel" for the DS, and it may soon be released as a complete game, either as a hack of a later version or a gamemaker project.

Ghosts don't need to be real to haunt.